Ivan Hewett on the sublime last night of the Leipzig Gewandhaus
Orchestra at the Barbican, which was devoted to Brahms

The last night of Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra’s four-concert residency at the Barbican gave us the sunniest aspect of Brahms, in his Violin Concerto, and the flintiest, in his Fourth Symphony.

As a curtain-raiser we had Brahms’s gravely beautiful A minor String Quartet, played at 6.00pm by the four members of the orchestra’s string section that make up the Gewandhaus-Quartett.

The perfectly clear acoustic of the new Milton Court concert hall forgives no blemishes, but here there were none. The way the piece eased gently into being, as if a door were being opened on a conversation already in progress, was a delight; as was the slight dragging of the third beat in the Quasi Menuetto, which brought out the music’s twilight mournfulness.

The sense of ease, springing from a tradition absolutely intact, was amply confirmed in the main evening concert. Conductor Riccardo Chailly never needed to micro-manage the fine texture of the music. He supplied the dynamism, the sense of a form pushing urgently or questioningly into the future; the orchestra’s own esprit de corps looked after such things as the rounding off of phrases, which was precise but never sharp.

And of course they made that extraordinary sound. It’s not always beautiful, in fact there were times, as in the Scherzo of the Fourth Symphony, when it had a pungent, invigorating clatter. The depth of the horn sound added a fascinating sombre colouring, particularly in the symphony’s stern Andante Moderato. But the word ‘sound’ is a feeble one to describe the illuminating effect of their grainy, many-layered weave. I’ve never heard so clearly the way this symphony grows from one tiny gesture, which then sends out shoots and tendrils in all directions.

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In the Violin Concerto, we might have expected the orchestra to be put in the shade. On the soloist’s platform was Leonidas Kavakos, a violinist who in terms of sheer statuesque power, and purity of tone, is surely peerless. Some violinists make us aware of the struggle in the first movement’s heroic octave leaps, but Kavakos just soared through them. And yet the really moving moment came in the slow movement, at the point where oboist Domenico Orlando returned to the wonderful melody with which he began. Did the performance’s sublime quality lie there, or in Kavakos’s tender entwined accompaniment, or in that curdled Leipzig bassoon-and-horn sound enveloping it all? It was impossible to tell.